iTunes Match explicit/clean music switch

Yeah, without the tool I can't find a way to add it, even now that I know what the tag is. It's not an extended tag so there's something "special" about it. It's similar to the Apple ID tag which is also not easy to remove.

EDIT: Now that I think about it more, I wonder if this thread won't get pulled. Apologies to the OP if this happens - @ the mods, the goal here was to try and find a solution to the fixing explicit tracks getting Matched to clean ones. 🙂

I know you're the last one who would let match skip through and just re-link, but for confirmation, should you try from a clean blank library?

I actually re-encoded the test file, so it was a different MD5 sum. It should have been picked up as different than my original file, but a better test would probably be a different song altogether that I haven't matched yet.

I'll need to dig some more to see if I can find another album that has a clean and explicit album, so I can start that from scratch.

Tenacious D "POD", and Green Day's "Longivew" (the former having an Edited version on iTunes). No difference with the metatag change. I have a feeling that it's not going to work.

I actually have a lot of Explicit tracks - some Punk and some Hip hop, specifically. I know it's Explciit because I hate the "Parental Advisory" AA and try to track down ones with the missing warning (I'm all growed up and don't need to see it). And I have Matched at least a dozen albums that I know are expliciit and I have yet to have an issue.

Maybe we're going about this the wrong way - if I find a post where a specific song is mentioned and I happen to have the same song, I'll definitely test my own song to see if maybe it's a song specific issue.

roebeet, identifying a track that hasn't matched correctly for someone else makes more sense than trying to get one that has matched for you in the past to misbehave. We may be on the right track here, but I don't think there's necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution to the general problem

Are there specific examples of a track getting switched for some people but matched correctly for others?

The stuff about tags is interesting but it still seems like there's a good possiblity that some tracks work and others don't, and some people just happen to be getting lucky or unlucky based on what they happen to have.

My guess is that the algorithm looks at the first five or ten or whatever seconds of a track, in some cases there's a bleeped word in the part that is checked, in other cases both versions are the same within that window and it matches wrong. And I do agree with the theory that in the case where the software can't figure out which of the two versions it is, it plays it safe and defaults to the clean version just in case.

However it's working, with this material there IS a difference in the waveform and they should be able to detect the difference. Obviously it's a trickier situation but at least in the case where iTunes stire has both versions they should be able to be aware of that when they're analyzing the song and could switch over to a more detailed analysis (or use metadata as a secondary check) when it's needed.

Mike, robeet's put up a post trying to gather specific examples of mis-matches. His own experience has been, well, stellar as I understand it, he gets the match as expected.

Yeah, I saw that. It's still possible that it's just the luck of the draw (I haven't come across any although I haven't checked to see if they have bleeped versions in the store). Has anyone found an example of a song that switches the clean/explicit for some people but is right for others (and even in that case the possibility of different masterings has to be eliminated)? I assume not, which is the point of that post. People have posted some specific examples, I guess he doesn't have any of those?

Haven't even heard if robeet's got any takers on his call for info. post yet. Differening results on the same track by different people certainly might tell us something. I'm sure there are a lot of things at play here. I'm waiting for the first "Match made my clean version all nasty" post, but I suspect that's one legal demanded some solid protection be in place for before launch.

Here's one that switched clean to explicit. Only one I've seen so far, and I agree that it's likely they have the system set to default to clean in the case of ambiguity.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3635775?tstart=120

There was no specific track specifed. I don't think I have any Blink 182 or 2Pac anyway.

The only solution I have found is to litteraly edit the mp4 file using a program such as garage band and add some random audio to the first couple seconds (I did 5 seconds). Then add the song to iTunes and under options change the track to start 5 seconds in. Next, add the song to the cloud. Your explicit track will start at 5 seconds (after the random audio) and won't be matched to another track. Listen away!

Just a HUGE pain in the ***!

~W.

Can anyone else confirm this works. This is indeed a lot of work, but I don't even care at this point. I just got a macbook pro loaded with garage band, so I'm ready to go. I'm currently loading up one cd at a time to icloud since this system is so incredibly glitchy. I'd rather deal with 15 songs at a time than 2,500. The cd I'm currently working on just has I believe 3 tracks that got switched to clean versions. I don't even care about the process anymore. I just can't handle edited music. It just ruins the whole experience for me. I have been emailing Apple support and they finally offered me a refund, but I have been holding out hoping someone can come up with a fix.

I matched all of mine by using a tagger and adding the ITUNESADVISORY field to all of my explicit aac files. The value is 1 for Explicit. This gives them the little red 'Explicit' tag in iTunes and alows a perfect match for explicit songs.

What application did you use to add the Explicit tag?